Quentaris - Quest of the Lost City - Book 1 - The Spell of Undoing

Calamity has befallen the city of Quentaris!
Due to a vengeful plot by warline Tolrush, Quentaris is uprooted - city, cliff-face, harbour and all - and hurled into the uncharted rift-maze.
Lost and adrift in this endless labyrinth of parallel universes, encountering both friend and foe, the city faces a daunting task. Somehow, Quentaris must forge a new identity and find its way home.
And nothing is ever as easy as it seems ...

This extraordinary first collection of short stories covers the landscape of dysfunctional childhood, urban angst, and human disconnection with a wit and insight that keep you riveted to the page. The characters here have rich and imaginative interior lives, but grave difficulty relating to the outside world. The beginning story, "Ducklings," introduces the over-weight and over-enthusiastic Marjorie, the last twelve-year-old you would want babysitting your toddler. In "Wanted" we meet Eleanor, a single girl living in Chicago who may or may not be dating a serial killer. "Another Cancer Story" is an unsentimental account of two sisters whose beloved mother just won't seem to die, and "The Last Dead Boyfriend" gives us a recovering addict who keeps encountering her recently deceased boyfriend, an unpleasant man she wished she'd broken up with before he died. Always funny, often dark, and wholly satisfying, these stories explore the longing for connection among characters who are frequently stricken with anxiety. Each story is rendered in a way that is surreal, vivid, and entirely convincing.

This book is intended to capture the interest of anyone who has been attracted to Russian culture through the greats of Russian literature, either through the texts themselves, or encountering them in the cinema, or opera.